Hold the management responsible. Fining the corporation will just result in pissing off their customers but will not discourage the corporation from doing it again unless they lose a significant number of customers.
My favored subsidy is to pay farmers to plow excess under. Waste the extra food. People recoil in horror but I think it is the most direct and effective way to overproduce without changing market prices too much. Of course, you have to police the farmers somehow to make sure that they actually dispose of the food, which is where the corruption part comes in...
People would be right to recoil in horror. How can you justify wasting good food when there are millions starving in other countries? Why not use that money to ship the excess to people in need, earning a lot of good will in the process?
Ha:-) Given as they are maybe 5% of the world population I think we can survive. It is good to not let the edge cases prevent a better solution. If the arctic has to do something strange for things to work I'm sure they will (and probably already are).
Adding up all the numbers of inhabitants of the Arctic circle in Wikipedia, I think the number is more along the lines of 0.01%!
It is stupid I agree. Another solution would be just specify the start of the work day relative to sunrise. Ie we work from sunrise + 1 to sunrise + 9. That way the sun would always have risen when you go to work and you'd have at least 1 hour a day to get your vitamin. The current system doesn't work in Canada or europe (and further north). For most people you wake up in the winter and the sun is just starting to rise, you get to work. By the time you leave work the sun has set. You go home in the dark. Thus you see the sun for all of the 20-30min you spend getting to work.
This would make the folk living within the Arctic or Antarctic circles very unproductive during the summer months!
It is way easier to change the clocks, especially now, than it is to try and remember the changing times for every organization we deal with each year. It would be insanity.
That's nice for local businesses. However, many modern businesses are multinational, so they already have to try to remember the different silly conventions regarding the start and end of DST. In my line of work we spend a lot of time in phone conferences with the UK -- who have different DST dates from the US -- so not only do you have to remember the 5 hour time difference, but also remain aware that that number varies depending on the time of the year!
Really? I wouldn't have done the same thing in his position -- but that's because I have a little something notably almost absent from the modern world: ethics.
Who expects honour amongst thieves? Seriously though, I'm sure most people, when faced with the option of betraying some guys they had never met or else getting thrown in jail (worse, an American jail) for essentially eternity, would choose the former. These people aren't martyrs or zealots.
He didn't sell out. His family was threatened.
He made a mistake.
Out of interest, in what way were his family threatened? He sold out for a reduced jail sentence. Its still a betrayal, no matter what way you look at it, and whether you agree or not. I probably would have done the same thing.
So what you're saying is you don't like when people blow the whistle on shit they know is illegal/wrong?
You're not a whistle-blower if you are the head of a resistance movement (or whatever) and sell out - you are a traitor. Whistle-blowers are generally people working for organisations that are doing bad things and trying to cover it up who, on moral grounds, release the information for the public good. For example Vidkun Quisling was certainly *not* a 'whistle-blower'!
Then go with a zero-knowledge provider like SpiderOak. All of the data is encrypted on their servers. Your password is encrypted before it even leaves your computer. (If you lose your password, your recovery option is "I'm fucked".)
Moreover, even if the feds came knocking on their door, all they could say is that you have x gigs of data on this particular server. The company can't even view your files, no matter how much they (or law enforcement, or a court) might want to.
Unfortunately many countries have laws under which you can be forced to give up your encryption keys to law enforcement. God only knows how the US has resisted implementing laws like this so far, although I don't see this situation lasting long considering how the government lately seems hell bent on eliminating the human rights of its citizens.
Give it to Iran or China perhaps? That was it will be more likely that governments around the world will stand up for the rights of their citizens if those countries decide to start asserting control.
Do exactly what the lawyers and industry wants you to do, because you're a web-based company with a lot of competition from other competing products, run on razor-thin margins because your product offering is free and supported only by advertising, and the prospect of a multi-million dollar loss to legal fees would probably end your company, and send all those hard-working employees to the unemployment office.
Slashdot readers often fail to understand that you can be right and still lose. You can even win... and still lose. In the copyright game, if you're a small to medium-sized business the only winning move is not to play.
Maybe a few high profile casualties of this piece of shit legislation are necessary in order to make it clear to the lawmakers that something needs to be done. Sucks for the guys who lose their jobs, but you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
You would end up with scientists becoming some cross between beggars and salesman, trying to sell a theory to the public based on little evidence and lots of bad analogies; I really don't think this would be good for science.
- there is literally no problem with that. No problem with some people becoming beggars and some people becoming salesman, WHY SHOULDN'T THEY SELL THE IDEA to somebody, that they should be funded, even if their research is never going to create any monetary incentives? Why not?
Because the general public are not capable of making those decisions; they do not have the background to be able to judge the merits of one argument against each other. This is why we have funding committees comprising trained scientists in charge of doling out the funding.
Why do you want to put a GUN to the heads of the individuals to steal money from them they earned this way, rather than allow somebody try and convince them that they may want, for the love of science or art, fund some of it?
People who don't have taxes to worry about are definitely much more likely to spend on frivolous things, and this IS frivolous, and people would spend this way too, even just for bragging rights, or maybe they have a personal agenda.
Can't say i've ever heard of someone being robbed at gunpoint to fund science, but I haven't lived in the US for that long:) Seriously though, I don't agree that blue sky science is frivolous, as it has very real and measurable economic benefits, which I have tried to outline previously. I also don't agree that by cutting taxes every Joe is going to become some sort of philanthropist. The probable outcome is that the prices of everyday products will just increase as the removal of taxes would just devalue the currency.
And by the way, even philosophically - you want your science to be funded by who? Slaves, that are stolen from, or free people, who care enough about it to chip in?
You have an interesting point of view concerning taxation. Personally I have no issue with paying taxes, as health, social security, defense, science funding and all those other things are in my opinion much better handled by an organisation that is (at least in principle) answerable to the people - the government.
PhDs, in the sciences at least, are not the same as masters courses (or MDs?) in that PhD students get funded by grants. Typically the grant covers the costs of the course and something like $20,000 for living expenses. Although this is a tiny amount of money, the students typically get subsidised housing so it doesn't work out badly at all. I've never heard of a self-funded PhD student.
True, but you also have to consider the value of your time. For experimental physics, the mean time to complete a PhD is around six years, and most people in that position could probably earn 40-50k straight out of school (not doing physics, of course). So the opportunity cost is something like $120k + interest on student loans from undergrad.
I understand your point but my argument was originally that to some, such as myself, the monetary incentive to leave physics and go into finance is not enough to make me give up a job that I love; I don't want to become just another suited drone slaving away shunting money around within computers in order to help make the CEOs and shareholders of some big soulless company rich. I make enough money as a physics postdoc to live very comfortably, for now that is all I desire. It all depends on what your priorities are.
You don't get a PhD without getting an undergrad degree first. No one's going to fund you to get an undergrad degree, unless you're one of the lucky few that gets a full-ride scholarship (which generally only go to minorities and women, people who probably aren't that interested in a PhD in sciences). Even if you get a scholarship, usually that won't pay all your living expenses, so you have to assume student loan debt to afford all that. It's quite normal now for someone to graduate college with $100k in student loan debt. With a $50-100k engineering job, that's not hard to pay off in a reasonable time. But if you go for a PhD living off of grants, how are you going to pay that loan back, with all the accumulated interest? $20k for living expenses isn't going to leave enough to pay your loan payments, and if you defer the payments, they're going to be astronomical when you finally get your PhD.
It does seem like the odds are stacked against American S&E students, I must admit. In the UK, our student loans are more like a graduate tax; the repayments are a percentage of your income, although you don't repay anything until you earn more than some reasonable amount. Of course there is interest, but it is not large (typically 3%). The loan is cancelled after 25 years of repayments or when the recipient turns 65. The American system has a much higher interest rate (6%) and little protection for people with low-earning career, and also the typical cost of a degree is several times larger than in the rest of the world; this crippling burden is, as you say, highly likely to drive all but the most determined (or wealthy) students from pursuing an academic career.
Unfortunately there is no way this situation is going to change without either serious government intervention (not going to happen!) or the general collapse of the US higher education system.
What I have seen as an American soon to have a PhD in physics, is that most physics PhD leave the field because of lack of jobs in physics. Depending on the sub-field of physics the production rate of PhDs can exceed the number of available jobs in the field by an order of magnitude. Basically one permanent position in academia per 10 or so PhDs. The problem comes from the fact that outside of a few sub-fields there is basically zero jobs in industry. The vast majority transistion into something else that uses some of the transferable, non-physics-specific skills they obtained.
In general there are plenty of postdoc positions available (I am a postdoc myself), but as you say, few permanent positions. Also, many of those with permanent positions become less involved with the physics and more involved with the politics, teaching and the management of a legion of PhD students. We can blame simple economics for this: firstly you don't need a huge amount of physics professors to satisfy the teaching requirements, which is where the money is for the universities, and secondly PhD students typically *make* money for the university from the ~$30k per year teaching costs paid for by the student's grant. Postdocs like myself seem only to be hired because the groups get more experienced employees that need less hand-holding for the same price (the 30k teaching costs just get paid to the postdoc rather than the university), but tend to be limited in numbers probably because of pressure from the university administration to support more PhD students.
I should add that this appears to be much more of a problem in the US than in Europe, where the universities are not private enterprises. I did my PhD in the UK, and there my group had significantly more professors and postdocs per PhD student.
- not necessarily. Basically it's the same reason that people funded artists out of pocket - for the love of the idea, it's not like all those artists made them money.
It would be nice if that was the case, but unlike art, very few members of the public have the educational background to understand the science, let alone distinguish science worth funding from the morass of crackpot nuttery. You would end up with scientists becoming some cross between beggars and salesman, trying to sell a theory to the public based on little evidence and lots of bad analogies; I really don't think this would be good for science.
I know that most science that can be done will never lead to anything, you can literally do trillions upon trillions upon trillions to the trillionths degree of experiments and never derive a single cent out of all that spending, is it wise to allow government to spend money stolen from individuals that way? No way in this world. That's way to destroy the economy.
As I argued in my previous message, government spending on blue sky science is highly beneficial to the economy, producing well-trained graduates and numerous spin-offs. I am still not convinced that the private sector would be willing to invest in this.
There are no bounds to how many experiments or ideas one can test. There are no bounds at all. You can spend the GDP of this planet until the Sun blows up on this stuff.
Surely the available tax money, as well as the need to spend on other things (war, as you say is one, but so are roads, health, social security, etc), is a sufficient bound on how much science can be funded? I suspect you will probably say that the government can print as much money as it wants, and that's true to an extent, but it is still bounded by how much inflation the economy can cope with.
But presumably these investors expect some sort of return on their investments? There are many aspects of science, particularly physics, which are highly highly unlikely to ever lead to a 'product'. The reason it is good to fund this kind of science is because of the indirect benefits such as developing new mathematical or computational techniques as well as training a large number of highly educated workers who often then contribute greatly to traditional businesses such as those who go into the finance sector. I just don't see that kind of nebulous economic benefit as being something that an investor would be willing to spend money on.
Public funding means 'public' (collective, the government) creating laws that are akin to what what a Mafia would do - "give us your money, you have a nice business going on here, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it."
Public funding is about the government force to steal money from individuals.
Out of interest, in your world how does basic science get funded? By this I mean so-called 'blue sky' research that may never have an application.
While not everyone is motivated by money, there is a certain amount of it needed to make something worthwhile. If you're going to spend tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars studying, and your prospects are doing what you studied for, and getting paid peanuts, or going into finance, and making an ass ton while not doing a lot of work, most people would choose the latter simply out of practicality.
Perhaps we should add the cost of education in the US as another factor why so few people stay in S&E? I did my undergraduate and PhD courses in the UK; for the former I have maybe $20,000 of means-tested student loans (payed back as a percentage of my income, so not a huge burden) and for the PhD they paid me.
This tends to discourage people that might have the impression that they can't make the financial transaction (of getting that degree) make sound financial sense.
High minded ideals are nice and all but things in the real world tend to require cold hard cash or a crippling level of debt.
PhDs, in the sciences at least, are not the same as masters courses (or MDs?) in that PhD students get funded by grants. Typically the grant covers the costs of the course and something like $20,000 for living expenses. Although this is a tiny amount of money, the students typically get subsidised housing so it doesn't work out badly at all. I've never heard of a self-funded PhD student.
Slashdot Mirror
omg! don't hold corporations accountable!
get a grip.
Hold the management responsible. Fining the corporation will just result in pissing off their customers but will not discourage the corporation from doing it again unless they lose a significant number of customers.
... now finally I can sleep my way to the top too! (joke)
.. the only ones getting hurt by the fines will AT&T's customers when they see their bills increase.
My favored subsidy is to pay farmers to plow excess under. Waste the extra food. People recoil in horror but I think it is the most direct and effective way to overproduce without changing market prices too much. Of course, you have to police the farmers somehow to make sure that they actually dispose of the food, which is where the corruption part comes in...
People would be right to recoil in horror. How can you justify wasting good food when there are millions starving in other countries? Why not use that money to ship the excess to people in need, earning a lot of good will in the process?
Ha :-) Given as they are maybe 5% of the world population I think we can survive. It is good to not let the edge cases prevent a better solution. If the arctic has to do something strange for things to work I'm sure they will (and probably already are).
Adding up all the numbers of inhabitants of the Arctic circle in Wikipedia, I think the number is more along the lines of 0.01%!
It is stupid I agree. Another solution would be just specify the start of the work day relative to sunrise. Ie we work from sunrise + 1 to sunrise + 9. That way the sun would always have risen when you go to work and you'd have at least 1 hour a day to get your vitamin. The current system doesn't work in Canada or europe (and further north). For most people you wake up in the winter and the sun is just starting to rise, you get to work. By the time you leave work the sun has set. You go home in the dark. Thus you see the sun for all of the 20-30min you spend getting to work.
This would make the folk living within the Arctic or Antarctic circles very unproductive during the summer months!
It is way easier to change the clocks, especially now, than it is to try and remember the changing times for every organization we deal with each year. It would be insanity.
That's nice for local businesses. However, many modern businesses are multinational, so they already have to try to remember the different silly conventions regarding the start and end of DST. In my line of work we spend a lot of time in phone conferences with the UK -- who have different DST dates from the US -- so not only do you have to remember the 5 hour time difference, but also remain aware that that number varies depending on the time of the year!
Really? I wouldn't have done the same thing in his position -- but that's because I have a little something notably almost absent from the modern world: ethics.
Who expects honour amongst thieves? Seriously though, I'm sure most people, when faced with the option of betraying some guys they had never met or else getting thrown in jail (worse, an American jail) for essentially eternity, would choose the former. These people aren't martyrs or zealots.
He didn't sell out. His family was threatened. He made a mistake.
Out of interest, in what way were his family threatened? He sold out for a reduced jail sentence. Its still a betrayal, no matter what way you look at it, and whether you agree or not. I probably would have done the same thing.
So what you're saying is you don't like when people blow the whistle on shit they know is illegal/wrong?
You're not a whistle-blower if you are the head of a resistance movement (or whatever) and sell out - you are a traitor. Whistle-blowers are generally people working for organisations that are doing bad things and trying to cover it up who, on moral grounds, release the information for the public good. For example Vidkun Quisling was certainly *not* a 'whistle-blower'!
A Higgs Bosom ? ... now thats gotta be a worth a look!
Bosom
N ...
Do you really want to see Higgs' bosom? Well, whatever floats your boat.....
Oh yeah. It's amasing how much stuff they find when their funding is up for review. Surely that is just a coincidence....
Not really, considering that they've already started cannibalising the machine for parts.
Then go with a zero-knowledge provider like SpiderOak. All of the data is encrypted on their servers. Your password is encrypted before it even leaves your computer. (If you lose your password, your recovery option is "I'm fucked".)
Moreover, even if the feds came knocking on their door, all they could say is that you have x gigs of data on this particular server. The company can't even view your files, no matter how much they (or law enforcement, or a court) might want to.
Unfortunately many countries have laws under which you can be forced to give up your encryption keys to law enforcement. God only knows how the US has resisted implementing laws like this so far, although I don't see this situation lasting long considering how the government lately seems hell bent on eliminating the human rights of its citizens.
Sorry, 'that was' was meant to be 'that way'.
And give it to whom?
Give it to Iran or China perhaps? That was it will be more likely that governments around the world will stand up for the rights of their citizens if those countries decide to start asserting control.
A perfectly reasonable response would be to
Do exactly what the lawyers and industry wants you to do, because you're a web-based company with a lot of competition from other competing products, run on razor-thin margins because your product offering is free and supported only by advertising, and the prospect of a multi-million dollar loss to legal fees would probably end your company, and send all those hard-working employees to the unemployment office. Slashdot readers often fail to understand that you can be right and still lose. You can even win... and still lose. In the copyright game, if you're a small to medium-sized business the only winning move is not to play.
Maybe a few high profile casualties of this piece of shit legislation are necessary in order to make it clear to the lawmakers that something needs to be done. Sucks for the guys who lose their jobs, but you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
You would end up with scientists becoming some cross between beggars and salesman, trying to sell a theory to the public based on little evidence and lots of bad analogies; I really don't think this would be good for science.
- there is literally no problem with that. No problem with some people becoming beggars and some people becoming salesman, WHY SHOULDN'T THEY SELL THE IDEA to somebody, that they should be funded, even if their research is never going to create any monetary incentives? Why not?
Because the general public are not capable of making those decisions; they do not have the background to be able to judge the merits of one argument against each other. This is why we have funding committees comprising trained scientists in charge of doling out the funding.
Why do you want to put a GUN to the heads of the individuals to steal money from them they earned this way, rather than allow somebody try and convince them that they may want, for the love of science or art, fund some of it?
People who don't have taxes to worry about are definitely much more likely to spend on frivolous things, and this IS frivolous, and people would spend this way too, even just for bragging rights, or maybe they have a personal agenda.
Can't say i've ever heard of someone being robbed at gunpoint to fund science, but I haven't lived in the US for that long :) Seriously though, I don't agree that blue sky science is frivolous, as it has very real and measurable economic benefits, which I have tried to outline previously. I also don't agree that by cutting taxes every Joe is going to become some sort of philanthropist. The probable outcome is that the prices of everyday products will just increase as the removal of taxes would just devalue the currency.
And by the way, even philosophically - you want your science to be funded by who? Slaves, that are stolen from, or free people, who care enough about it to chip in?
You have an interesting point of view concerning taxation. Personally I have no issue with paying taxes, as health, social security, defense, science funding and all those other things are in my opinion much better handled by an organisation that is (at least in principle) answerable to the people - the government.
You ever think beyond your current circumstance?
Not sure what you're driving at here.
PhDs, in the sciences at least, are not the same as masters courses (or MDs?) in that PhD students get funded by grants. Typically the grant covers the costs of the course and something like $20,000 for living expenses. Although this is a tiny amount of money, the students typically get subsidised housing so it doesn't work out badly at all. I've never heard of a self-funded PhD student.
True, but you also have to consider the value of your time. For experimental physics, the mean time to complete a PhD is around six years, and most people in that position could probably earn 40-50k straight out of school (not doing physics, of course). So the opportunity cost is something like $120k + interest on student loans from undergrad.
I understand your point but my argument was originally that to some, such as myself, the monetary incentive to leave physics and go into finance is not enough to make me give up a job that I love; I don't want to become just another suited drone slaving away shunting money around within computers in order to help make the CEOs and shareholders of some big soulless company rich. I make enough money as a physics postdoc to live very comfortably, for now that is all I desire. It all depends on what your priorities are.
You don't get a PhD without getting an undergrad degree first. No one's going to fund you to get an undergrad degree, unless you're one of the lucky few that gets a full-ride scholarship (which generally only go to minorities and women, people who probably aren't that interested in a PhD in sciences). Even if you get a scholarship, usually that won't pay all your living expenses, so you have to assume student loan debt to afford all that. It's quite normal now for someone to graduate college with $100k in student loan debt. With a $50-100k engineering job, that's not hard to pay off in a reasonable time. But if you go for a PhD living off of grants, how are you going to pay that loan back, with all the accumulated interest? $20k for living expenses isn't going to leave enough to pay your loan payments, and if you defer the payments, they're going to be astronomical when you finally get your PhD.
It does seem like the odds are stacked against American S&E students, I must admit. In the UK, our student loans are more like a graduate tax; the repayments are a percentage of your income, although you don't repay anything until you earn more than some reasonable amount. Of course there is interest, but it is not large (typically 3%). The loan is cancelled after 25 years of repayments or when the recipient turns 65. The American system has a much higher interest rate (6%) and little protection for people with low-earning career, and also the typical cost of a degree is several times larger than in the rest of the world; this crippling burden is, as you say, highly likely to drive all but the most determined (or wealthy) students from pursuing an academic career.
Unfortunately there is no way this situation is going to change without either serious government intervention (not going to happen!) or the general collapse of the US higher education system.
What I have seen as an American soon to have a PhD in physics, is that most physics PhD leave the field because of lack of jobs in physics. Depending on the sub-field of physics the production rate of PhDs can exceed the number of available jobs in the field by an order of magnitude. Basically one permanent position in academia per 10 or so PhDs. The problem comes from the fact that outside of a few sub-fields there is basically zero jobs in industry. The vast majority transistion into something else that uses some of the transferable, non-physics-specific skills they obtained.
In general there are plenty of postdoc positions available (I am a postdoc myself), but as you say, few permanent positions. Also, many of those with permanent positions become less involved with the physics and more involved with the politics, teaching and the management of a legion of PhD students. We can blame simple economics for this: firstly you don't need a huge amount of physics professors to satisfy the teaching requirements, which is where the money is for the universities, and secondly PhD students typically *make* money for the university from the ~$30k per year teaching costs paid for by the student's grant. Postdocs like myself seem only to be hired because the groups get more experienced employees that need less hand-holding for the same price (the 30k teaching costs just get paid to the postdoc rather than the university), but tend to be limited in numbers probably because of pressure from the university administration to support more PhD students.
I should add that this appears to be much more of a problem in the US than in Europe, where the universities are not private enterprises. I did my PhD in the UK, and there my group had significantly more professors and postdocs per PhD student.
- not necessarily. Basically it's the same reason that people funded artists out of pocket - for the love of the idea, it's not like all those artists made them money.
It would be nice if that was the case, but unlike art, very few members of the public have the educational background to understand the science, let alone distinguish science worth funding from the morass of crackpot nuttery. You would end up with scientists becoming some cross between beggars and salesman, trying to sell a theory to the public based on little evidence and lots of bad analogies; I really don't think this would be good for science.
I know that most science that can be done will never lead to anything, you can literally do trillions upon trillions upon trillions to the trillionths degree of experiments and never derive a single cent out of all that spending, is it wise to allow government to spend money stolen from individuals that way? No way in this world. That's way to destroy the economy.
As I argued in my previous message, government spending on blue sky science is highly beneficial to the economy, producing well-trained graduates and numerous spin-offs. I am still not convinced that the private sector would be willing to invest in this.
There are no bounds to how many experiments or ideas one can test. There are no bounds at all. You can spend the GDP of this planet until the Sun blows up on this stuff.
Surely the available tax money, as well as the need to spend on other things (war, as you say is one, but so are roads, health, social security, etc), is a sufficient bound on how much science can be funded? I suspect you will probably say that the government can print as much money as it wants, and that's true to an extent, but it is still bounded by how much inflation the economy can cope with.
The way it was always done: angel investors.
But presumably these investors expect some sort of return on their investments? There are many aspects of science, particularly physics, which are highly highly unlikely to ever lead to a 'product'. The reason it is good to fund this kind of science is because of the indirect benefits such as developing new mathematical or computational techniques as well as training a large number of highly educated workers who often then contribute greatly to traditional businesses such as those who go into the finance sector. I just don't see that kind of nebulous economic benefit as being something that an investor would be willing to spend money on.
Public funding means 'public' (collective, the government) creating laws that are akin to what what a Mafia would do - "give us your money, you have a nice business going on here, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it."
Public funding is about the government force to steal money from individuals.
Out of interest, in your world how does basic science get funded? By this I mean so-called 'blue sky' research that may never have an application.
While not everyone is motivated by money, there is a certain amount of it needed to make something worthwhile. If you're going to spend tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars studying, and your prospects are doing what you studied for, and getting paid peanuts, or going into finance, and making an ass ton while not doing a lot of work, most people would choose the latter simply out of practicality.
Perhaps we should add the cost of education in the US as another factor why so few people stay in S&E? I did my undergraduate and PhD courses in the UK; for the former I have maybe $20,000 of means-tested student loans (payed back as a percentage of my income, so not a huge burden) and for the PhD they paid me.
The PhD isn't free. Neither is the MD.
This tends to discourage people that might have the impression that they can't make the financial transaction (of getting that degree) make sound financial sense.
High minded ideals are nice and all but things in the real world tend to require cold hard cash or a crippling level of debt.
PhDs, in the sciences at least, are not the same as masters courses (or MDs?) in that PhD students get funded by grants. Typically the grant covers the costs of the course and something like $20,000 for living expenses. Although this is a tiny amount of money, the students typically get subsidised housing so it doesn't work out badly at all. I've never heard of a self-funded PhD student.